Salvation encompasses more than just the forgiveness of sins through Christ’s blood—it includes the transformative power of Christ living within the believer. While the blood of Jesus deals with our individual sins (plural), the indwelling Christ provides victory over the power of sin (singular) in our daily lives. Just as Peter could only walk on water by keeping his eyes on Jesus, believers can only overcome sin’s power by completely surrendering to and relying on Christ’s life within them, rather than attempting to live the Christian life through their own strength.

Automatically Generated Transcript

[00:00:00] This morning I want to talk on a topic that has to do with the general theme I’ve been pursuing for some time, which has to do with the connection between the Gospel and discipleship. The fact that the scriptures teach us that our being brought under the power of the Word of God isn’t only just to give us a ticket into heaven, but it’s to help us to become more Christian living as well. And our salvation includes not only that we’re forgiven, but also that we become the process of being sanctified. And that’s a part of what the Gospel does in a person, not only bringing them to Christ in the first place, but also lays the groundwork for us being able to have our lives changed. The salvation that the scriptures proclaim is not just salvation from the penalty of sin, but it’s salvation from the sin. And that’s probably often the more difficult part for us to take on board. And so we’ll start with,

[00:01:07] I’ve just got four or five verses to take you through and hope that the structure of it will remain easy because of those verses. But we’ll start with the fact in Galatians that Paul has something to say about our salvation that isn’t representative of everything that we know about salvation, and he’s been teaching them about the business that they shouldn’t take themselves back under the law of the Old Testament, but should leave themselves in the salvation that the New Testament through the New Covenant offers. If I would rebuild what I tore down, I proved myself to be a transgressor. That’s going backwards if you put yourself under the law. For though through the law I died to the law, so that I might live to God. The whole purpose of salvation, of us becoming a Christian, is that we should live to God. And that’s what the idea of being saved is about, not only

[00:02:11] just to get you into heaven when you die. And so he goes on to say, I have been crucified with Christ. And he is beginning to outline the fact that the key to Christian living, the key to finding the deeper Christian walk, is not just getting forgiven then trying hard. And it’s got a lot to do with being crucified with Christ, whatever that may mean. It is no longer, I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And so right here we have again that emphasis of the Gospel, that not only are we to come to Jesus who died for us, but we’re to come to the Jesus to allow him to live in us. The life that I live, but Christ lives in me. And the life that I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God. Jesus is the center of everything to do with salvation. Not only the heralding of what he did when he was on earth,

[00:03:13] when he lived he taught, he died, he bore our sins in that death. He went to the place of the dead, which is Hades. Eventually he was resurrected from the dead and returned to heaven. All of that is what Jesus did for your salvation. But there’s something that Jesus wants to do to produce that salvation in you when he lives in you. But Christ lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh,

[00:03:41] I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me. I do not nullify the grace of God by going back to the law. For if righteousness were wrought through the law, then Christ died for no purpose. Now, it’s really interesting in this particular spot that the apostle Paul is making very clear that we need to have the effect of Jesus’ death. One of the ways that his death and its effect in bringing us to a place of forgiveness

[00:04:16] is to refer to his shedding of his blood. Coming from the Old Testament picture of a sacrificial system where there was no forgiveness of sins unless there was a sacrifice and blood was shed. So also, it is in the New Covenant times that the forgiveness of sins rests upon the death of Jesus, which involves the shedding of his blood. It’s a way, a metaphor of speaking of his death, to speak about his blood. And one of the things that you’ll find

[00:04:47] as you read through the writings that Paul gives in his book of Romans, there’s no better example, is you discover that he seems to have two aspects of Jesus and what he’s done for you that’s involved in your salvation. Sometimes in circles, back when I was a young fellow, a lot of the people in the church would talk about the blood of Christ, often getting reactions from non-Christian people to say it’s a rather gory way to present your religion

[00:05:14] to talk about blood. But the blood of Jesus actually has great significance in the telling of the gospel because it’s picking up on the Old Testament understanding without the shedding of blood, there’s no remission of sins. And it’s showing all of that was by the picture because later on in the New Testament, it says the blood of bulls and goats couldn’t do anything about sins.

[00:05:37] But it was to picture that the need of the shedding of blood was going to be the Messiah. And Jesus’ death and the shedding of his blood, all of that picture was how he did business with the Father for our sins to be forgiven. And so the first half of the book of, well not the first half, maybe the first quarter of the book of Romans, is actually about the fact of the blood necessary for our sins. But what is really interesting is that you will find that there are verses that talk so, there’s not a lot of them.

[00:06:11] But when they do talk about it being the blood that’s necessary for the forgiveness of sins, what’s interesting is that they talk about sins plural. And as you keep turning the pages of the book of Romans, We’re still in the second half of the first half. You find that there’s a subtle change in the language that Paul is using in the book, because he talks about not just the forgiveness of sins, he talks about the dynamic and the evil and the energy and the bondage of sin. And so this book of Romans talks about sins, plural,

[00:06:49] and sin that’s the dynamic, the evil, the fact that we have sinned in us as something that pushes us away from God, sins that need to be forgiven by the blood of Jesus and sin. And that first verse that I was quoting to you, if we put it back up on the screen, the one from Galatians, talks about the fact that the answer to sin is Christ and his living in you. And you need to understand these two aspects of salvation, that the book of Romans is basing all of its thesis on, that Christ’s death and the shedding of his blood brings us the forgiveness of sins, so God overlooks the fact that you sinned because Jesus paid for it on the cross. He shed his blood, he gave his life, he suffered the rejection of the Father because of your sins and they’re done and gone. And one of the first things that helps us get our feet steady as a Christian and to go on growing is to come to the place

[00:07:57] of final rest in the fact that Jesus shed blood, has answered all of your sins. And even in the future when maybe after becoming a Christian you slip up somewhere and you sin, sin singular, you’ve done something wrong and we all trip and fall at times. The Bible’s answer written by the Apostle John is right at the end of the New Testament because he wrote it later when he was an old man. Remember he was just a young, still teenager when Jesus had him as a disciple. But when he’s an old man he writes in 1 John, he says about if we sin, then there is an advocate with the Father and if we confess our sins, and again there’s a singular and the plural, but when you confess your sins, the blood of Jesus covers it. Well the verse actually says in 1 John 1.9 if we confess our sins, he’s faithful and just to forgive us our sins. Sometimes the versions will say iniquity, forgive us where we’ve stepped off the track and so there

[00:09:12] is always that forgiveness available through the blood of Christ or the death of Christ. It doesn’t really matter to me, some people prefer not to mention the word blood and so they’ll say the death of Christ. In fact they have a good precedent of that as we look into the Old Testament. Now I’m not sure which verse I was going to tell you, but the one in Isaiah, if we go to next and there, and thank you. It was the will of the Lord to crush him. Now this is a modern translation, it was the will of the Lord to crush him and the older versions more talked about it being that Jesus bore our sins and he was absolutely, well crush is a good word I suppose, and he’s the one who has put him to grief. That’s the Father has put him Jesus to grief. When he makes his soul an offering for guilt, and he shall see his offspring, the result of it, and he shall prosper in his days, and the will of the Lord shall prosper in his hand, and out of the anguish

[00:10:30] of his soul, he shall see and be satisfied. Now what this is getting at is about the of the blood, about the sacrifice that the son made on the cross. Not the Old Testament regime which was just symbolic and pointing forward to the real one which would be made by Jesus. But because of what he has done, your sins can be totally forgiven, covered. And Jesus, the Father, about your sins will be satisfied. And you can know that Christ’s sacrifice is always sufficient. And this was written near the end of the New Testament about an old man who’d been living the Christian life and knowing how it worked. That if you sinned, you confess it. And the blood of Christ or the death of Christ satisfies the Father and you are forgiven and you are made righteous in God’s eyes. That’s one half of it. But the other half of it is that God wants to do is to allow his son Jesus, salvation is

[00:11:33] always in Jesus. Not just to die for you but he wants him to have the opportunity to live for you”. For me to live is Christ says the Apostle Paul. He knows that it’s necessary not for only us to get forgiven but he knows that it’s necessary for us to be able to have the power to be different. And that power we discover in ourselves to be missing. In the whole book of Romans I’m not going to give us a big lecture on Romans today, but that goes through how Paul discovered that he was a wretched man and cried out for help as someone who couldn’t get over his own sin. And he’s not just talking the sins done, he’s talking about the dynamic that keeps on popping up,

[00:12:16] the self-will that gets in the way and causes us to do the things that spoil our Christian walk. That sin that’s in you that you’ve struggled with so much time and you come to church and you try your hardest to sing well and we have good music at all. But there’s something that you know that you’re just a bit of a phony because you’ve come here and put on a good show

[00:12:38] but you know maybe you’re not quite as good as that show is or you like the rest of us because all of us have not only the problem to know the forgiveness of sins, plural but we’ve got a monster called sin that’s a part of us ever since the fall of the human race. And the only answer to that is one, know your forgiveness and to trust in the person of Jesus Christ, by his Spirit living in you that he’ll produce a real Christian life. It sometimes can be a crisis for someone who’s become a Christian and thought they’re going

[00:13:17] to do pretty well as a Christian. They had lots off the church, they had personality here, they had gifts of music there, or they were going to really join in with the young people that get on well with the young people, whatever it is that they think they have and they have a try and six months later they’ve made a real mess. Or three years later some people it takes longer because they’ve got will and strength of character to keep pushing on, but it’s gradually daunting and this is what happened to the Apostle Paul trying hard by being a Jew to please God through the Jewish way and only coming to the place of recognising that sin had gotten him. One particular sin, he said, was coverlessness. There’s different forms of coverlessness, I don’t know what type he had, but he was caught out that he couldn’t conquer sin. But the answer that

[00:14:10] he found for me to live is Christ. That’s why he has to say I’m crucified with Christ. I’ve seen that Christ has gone to the cross for my sins and so I’m done with really being committed to them and now he’s come to live in me and by his indwelling and his empowerment, by his Holy Spirit, he will live the Christian life. It is a crisis some people experience in one awful moment when they realise how big a phony they are at going to church. All their efforts to serve the Lord have really come to a mess. Other people, it’s not such a climactic mess, it’s just a sudden realisation that’s it’s a bit more difficult than they had supposed. Whether you are a person that comes to that realisation slowly or whether you are a person who comes to some great climax, well you have to admit that you’re not cut out in the dept of you to stop being a sinner the way you thought you were. Jesus may have

[00:15:11] died for you. Jesus may have made you a Christian. You’ve been truly been regenerated in some sense that you’ve got Christian longings and some things have changed that you want to do heavenly pleasing things, but you still have sin. And the answer to that sin is the person of Jesus. True, if you do sin in individual things, you confess them and get forgiven as in 1 John 1.9. But to stop being someone who the sinful part of you has actually dominated your character in little ways that you’ve trembled to admit. Then if that’s you, there’s only one answer as the person of Jesus. And to get before him, and like the Apostle Paul had to do, is to say, I can’t do it. When he does in the middle of the book of Romans, he says, oh wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from this body of death? I’ve explained this before, but the pattern that they had of really giving heaps to terrible prisoners

[00:16:17] was to take the shirt off their back and chain them back to back to a dead corpse. It was called a body of death. But the dead corpse had been there in the dungeon for a while and it stank and it was filled with worms and the decay of its flesh, when put back to back with a pit with a poor person thrown there, all the worms and the decay ate their way through. And that’s the cry, the prisoner cries, who will deliver me from this body of death? That’s us. Because sin, the principle of it, still in us and won’t be taken away until we get to glory, we’ll get glorified and we’ll be missing totally in heaven. But now that’s our problem. And when you recognise the problem, there’s only one answer. It’s the person of Jesus. To say to him, Lord, like the Apostle Paul says, I can’t. And then the very next verse, if you find it in Romans, in the middle of Romans, he says, but thanks

[00:17:22] Peter God, who through the Lord Jesus Christ has delivered him. And it is an ongoing growing experience that you can get of getting a victory over those sins. Not necessarily to mean that you become sinless and no one gets to be sinless until you go to heaven. Not necessarily mean that you won’t be prone to being tempted to get into the same area because where you’ve set up a mental weakness can often be where the devil will come back and have a second go. But it means that you can find yourself through to wherein lies the source of the victory. And it is your admitting to yourself, this I cannot do my own. Only Jesus can. And the call out to him. And there’s so many pictures in the scriptures to give us a demonstration of this truth that Jesus gave. One of which is my favourite one, where it’s the story as in not true, but the occasion when Jesus came walking on the water. And in that particular

[00:18:37] time you can find it later in the scriptures where he says his disciples over the lake. He knows there’s a storm coming and he goes up the top of a mountain praying and he can see his disciples. Lake Galilee was one that you couldn’t see over if you’re down on the stones of the seashore. If you went up in a mountain like Jesus, you could see across the other side and he could see the storm that came sweeping in and Jesus could see those disciples. They didn’t know enough about boats, so when the wind came in the opposite direction, you had to tack your way. We know that these days. But back then, if the wind was contrary, you pulled down the sails and you tried rowing. There were his disciples rowing in the middle of the lake. It’s night time. Fearful of dying and being drowned and there we stories of drowned sailors say it’s fishermen in the past who their ghosts

[00:19:29] came up and troubled folk and if you saw a ghost at Met and you’re next getting taken to drown them and these disciples they’re in the middle of the lake and they’re rowing and they’re rowing and they’re doing the best. That’s just how someone here today is. You feel yourself rowing but you can’t get clear of the storm. But Jesus comes and he alone can lift us from the bondage of sin and Jesus was walking on the water and he made his own walk past the road he knew what he was doing of course. They try out, they think he’s a ghost of some sort and it was the hint that they’re the next to drown. And Jesus tells them who he is and Peter does that wonderful thing of saying, Lord if it’s you, ask me to come to you on the water. Peter with his big strong legs, I picture him as opposite of me, someone with big thick legs and he stepped out of the boat and to his

[00:20:34] surprise the water somehow holds him up and he walks. I don’t know why but he got a moment of fear whether it was that a storm flashed some of the water in his face. More likely he turned around and saw the frightened faces of all the other disciples. He began to disbelieve or to be afraid and he began to sink. But he did the right thing. He looked back to Jesus and cried out, Lord save me. At the moment the Lord was across to him and lifted him up and the two of them got into the boat. Now I believe that storyline is there in the Bible. The picture for us that salvation isn’t only that you get forgiven and then try your best. Not just you obey Jesus and paddle hard when there’s a storm but it is that you believe in a miracle. That his presence by the Holy Spirit in your life can give you a victory over the storm. And he says, he calls, he gives opportunity and Peter had the faith to take him up on it.

[00:21:48] If you want to learn how to be a Christian you’ve got to learn with the Apostle Paul for me to live is Christ. There is no other way to defeat the principle of sin singular. You can get your sins forgiven every time you fail but you can’t defeat the principle of sin unless it’s Jesus defeating it in you. And when you get so desperate to know that you can’t the next step can be that you turn it all over to him. I’ve discovered that of people I’ve met around the world actually who have sought to find a way to get on top of their difficulties and everybody has their little personal difficulties are the ones who’ve come to say I won’t trust myself. I’m going to trust in him and anybody who tries out to Jesus he will hear them. I won’t say what he’ll reply. I won’t say what he’ll do. Sometimes his method is to get you out of the drowning moment and back in the boat. Others it is to take you through to where that is going to take you to go. I don’t know Jesus

[00:23:10] purposes but I do know there’s one place of rest it is with your hand in his and your trust in him to be the other half of the salvation. I’m talking today about the two halves of salvation. One about our sins plural and the other about sin singular. You might ask Jim when did you get this idea from? Well actually there was a Chinese man a long time ago back in the middle 1900s and earlier who came to Christ and became a preacher around everywhere and after he’d been in prison for a while but after he was imprisoned Christian Brothers found his records of his sermons and put them together in a book. And in the book I was reading it during the week one of the books the first one that was actually written he didn’t write it but his friends did and it’s talking about the same thing is how to get established as a Christian. He actually calls it the normal Christian life and then he wrote another one which is called Sit, Walk and Stand and Simple Steps.

[00:24:35] Learned to sit first, learned to sit, stand and walk anyway, no, learned to walk and also stand, stand against the evil one. And that second book, one of our home groups is going to go through, starting to go through at this time. And if you’re interested in learning more from what really is the teaching of Watchman Nee, a Chinese Christian who blessed the world in the writings that were done for him of his sermons, then please ask me about the home group I’ll tell you which one to go to and to go on to have that teaching. But for us with the scriptures, we know that by trusting Jesus, just keep in your mind his blood and keep in mind his person. I am crucified with Christ, yet I live, yet not I, but Christ lives in me. And so you learn to come to the benefit of his blood by bringing your sins and you learn to trust in the power of his person by casting all your care upon him.

[00:25:48] Bible says that. Cast all your care upon him. Lead on him. I actually, as a speaker, a preacher, had to learn this lesson some very hard ways. I got to the place where if I had a meeting and it was difficult or someone put me on the spot, put me up to preach before I was ready. And in my mind, I didn’t make it look like it, but I would lean back into Christ. And simply in my heart, I didn’t say it out loud, I say, Lord, this is not for me, it’s for you to do. You speak. Because I found that day the secret of preaching, the secret of preaching, is in the person who speaks through you. And when you at last recognise that you don’t have much to do with your little stories and the rest, that you can’t do the biggest thing that needs to happen to bring people to him is what he has to do. And when you lean back into Jesus, you can do that no matter what be the issue of your life. Lean back into Jesus and let him carry the entire thing. And he never fails.

[00:27:17] He never fails. You can trust in the power of the Lord and rest in the power of his victory, no matter what the scene is that you have. Let’s pray. Lord Jesus, how do we all need you so much? How is it that we are so ignorant to rest in our own paths? How is it, Lord, that maybe we don’t have the humility to admit what we don’t have of ourselves? Help us to get past that. And Lord, not only to always be careful to know that your shed blood brings forgiveness of sins, but also that your divine person, by your spirit and our hearts, can do for us what we cannot do for ourselves. And we entrust ourselves to you now in this way, in Jesus’ name. Amen.